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Deadline Nears for Weather Channel Bids

A half-dozen media companies have signaled that they plan to bid for the Weather Channel, which is up for auction, people involved in the talks said Wednesday.

The suitors, these people said, include NBC, CBS, the Walt Disney Company, Time Warner, the Comcast Corporation and Liberty Media.

Also, a handful of private equity firms, including Bain Capital, Providence Equity Partners and Madison Dearborn, have indicated an interest, though they are unlikely to be serious bidders because of the tight credit markets.

The Weather Channel, owned by Landmark Communications, a privately held company controlled by the Batten family of Norfolk, Va., has set Friday as a deadline for preliminary bids, these people said.

Landmark put the Weather Channel up for sale as part of a breakup of the company; it is separately auctioning its newspaper holdings, which include The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, The News & Record of Greensboro, N.C., and The Roanoke Times in Virginia, as well as 50 community newspapers.

Landmark indicated that it is hoping to sell the Weather Channel for as much as $5 billion, these people said. However, several prospective suitors have suggested that the asking price is too high and should be $4 billion at the most.

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While the Weather Channel, one of the last privately owned cable channels, has received interest from many big companies, it is unclear how many of them plan to bid aggressively.

Any preliminary offer is nonbinding and is part of a only first round of bids.

Beyond the Weather Channel’s cable presence, bidders are said to be interested in its Web site, weather.com, which frequently ranks in the top 20 media sites by traffic, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, and has more than 30 million users. Still, no big Internet company like Google has expressed an interest in the auction

Among the bidders, NBC, a unit of General Electric, appears well placed; it could merge the Weather Channel with its weather-related unit called NBC Weather Plus, a joint project of NBC News and NBC affiliates.

CBS has also expressed interest; it would help the company build its cable presence. Comcast is attracted to the channel, people close to the company said, but does not appear to be prepared to bid aggressively. Disney, Time Warner and Liberty Media have signaled interest, these people said, but have expressed skepticism about the price.